The Trust Ove IP Stack – A Path to Global Interoperability for SSI and Verifiable Credentials

The Trust-Over-IP Stack: A Path to Global Interoperability for SSI & Verifiable Credentials

Wednesday 10L

Convener: John Jordan, Province of British Columbia; Drummond Reed, Evernym & Sovrin Foundation; and Chris Buchanan, Mitre

Notes-taker(s): Drummond Reed

Tags for the session - technology discussed/ideas considered:

Discussion notes, key understandings, outstanding questions, observations, and, if appropriate to this discussion: action items, next steps:

First John gave an introduction that the solutions we are developing with SSI (self-sovereign identity) are actually much bigger than identity—they form the infrastructure required for a trust layer for the entire Internet. And this "interoperability stack" bears a strong resemblance to the TCP/IP stack that is what produced the Internet itself. That's why John coined the term "Trust over IP" (ToIP) for the stack that has emerged.

Drummond then presented this set of slides that show the progression from the previous models of identity into the SSI stack and then the ToIP stack.

Finally, Chris shared his hypothesis that government customers are going to want to start making purchase orders for "SSI compliant" solutions and the industry is going to need to have a way of certifying solutions as being "true SSI". We had a long discussion about this because there are many such tests, including the Decentralization Rubrics that the W3C DID Working Group is going to be publishing. So it may be difficult to come up with a single overall certification. However Drummond made the point that the individual layers of the ToIP stack could each have certifications against specific governance frameworks developed for each layer.

Drummond closed by sharing that anyone interested in this work is welcome to join the Sovrin Governance Framework Working Group—it is open to anyone to participate.